PKM Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Darren Almond (b. 1971), a British contemporary artist, from November 15 to December 30, 2018, displaying his new series of works. This exhibition is Almond's second solo exhibition in Korea after his first solo show at PKM Gallery in 2010. Darren Almond weaves together the subjects of time, places and memories lyrically through a variety of media, and for his second show at PKM Gallery, the artist will present a dozen of his most recently produced works.
For Darren Almond, 'time' is something that is not at all absolute but something rather variable, something that is relatively capable of being interpreted. His most representative series, the Fullmoon series, is a series of photographs of natural sceneries that appear under the reflected light of the full moon of which the artist has been exploring for twenty years since 1998, using extended exposure time of fifteen minutes or more. Out of Almond's Fullmoon series presented in this exhibition, Above the Sea of Fog in particular has the same title as the famous painting by the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich(b.1772-d.1840). This implies that Almond works on his series production taking references from landscapes that appear in 19th century romantic paintings, of locations that hold cultural and historical meanings, and of places that he finds by wandering through uninhibited remote locations himself. Almond's landscape photography that depicts the moonlit Mother Nature beyond the cityscape, a scene of nature without a sole artificial light, can be highlighted by the fact that it harnesses not only the time of the man holding the camera but also the vast length of time borne by the earth/nature.
Along with Almond's signature Fullmoon series, this exhibition will also reveal Almond's newest series of works that the artist has been recently experimenting with. Above all, Almond's mirror painting series titled Reflect Within as well as the drawings that contain the ideas of the mirror paintings will be premiered for the first time. These mirror painting and drawing series took motifs from a digital flip clock at a train station, where the numbers on the screens of the flip clock appear segmented or in reverse, which seem to act more like signifiers rather than functioning as numbers that indicate time, deviating from the clock's main purpose. In addition to this, the mirror panels assembled in a grid shape that reflect the viewer bit by bit in real time allow us to rethink about the mechanism of time and to subjectively reconstruct the frame of time.
Besides the mirror paintings, another recent work by Almond is a bronze piece titled Sometimes which is based on a train sign that connotes the modern history of Great Britain. This work is also viewer-oriented in terms of the fact that the adverb 'sometimes' can turn up within different sentences in each viewer's mind. The 'flow and duration of time' functions as a keyword that penetrates this show. This characteristic of the show reflects the artist's idea that time is something that can be transcended and manipulated, not something that is completely immutable. When interpreted in this way, the artist's attitude towards time seems to be connected with the ways of thinking in Oriental philosophy. This exhibition hopes to offer the viewers with an opportunity to savour the diverse time-scape of Darren Almond.
Darren Almond was the youngest artist included in the YBA group show titled Sensation in 1997, and has won his recognition in the international art world since. He was nominated for the 2005 Turner Prize as a finalist with If I Had You, a video installation about his synesthetic memories of his grandmother. Almond has participated in many international art biennials including the Berlin Biennale (2001), Venice Biennale (2003), Busan Biennale (2004), Tate Triennial (2009), and so on. He has held more than seventy solo exhibitions at numerous world renowned art institutions around the world including Mudam Luxemburg (Luxemburg, 2017), Scai the Bathhouse (Tokyo, 2016), White Cube (London and Hong Kong), K21 (Dusseldorf, 2005), De Appel (Amsterdam, 2001), to name a few. Almond is currently participating in the Crossrail Art Progamme, funded by Great Britain's largest metropolitan railroad corporation, along with artists including Yayoi Kusama and Douglas Gordon.
Press release courtesy PKM Gallery.
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